Читать книгу Mafia Politics - Marco Santoro - Страница 13

The Sicilian mafia is the main empirical focus of this book, on the assumption that, while not exhausting the phenomenon, this regional and historical case has a sort of ontological primacy – at the very least for giving the name to the category. However, in developing and testing its arguments, the book makes comparative references to other mafias as well, especially the American Cosa Nostra (strongly linked to the Sicilian mafia), the Neapolitan camorra, the Calabria-based ’ndrangheta, the Russian mafiya, the Japanese yakuza and the Chinese triads. An unusual comparative attention is also devoted to a still relatively understudied instance of mafia, the Indian mafia (Ghosh 1991; Michelutti et al. 2018). It is one of the strategic moves of the book to compare cases of mafia life in geographically and culturally distant locations that may have some commonalities in their political histories. What makes India an interesting comparative case for a study of mafia focused on the Sicilian case is its colonial past under the British.

Suffice it to say that, over ten centuries, Sicily was conquered and ruled by such different peoples as Muslim Saracens, Normans, the French, Aragones, the Spanish and, finally, (northern) Italians. After unification, Sicily accounted for a large portion of the Italian emigration towards the United States, Latin America and Africa. Emigration means not only exit and loss, but also gaining new ideas and institutions through transnational circuits, mimicry and imitation. The American experience is an integral part of the Sicilian mafia’s current repertoire – a pattern that works also for other Italian mafias. But the same could be said for other experiences of contact and interchange as well. Muslim domination lasted two centuries, leaving a deep cultural heritage that is still visible in folklore, language, art and gastronomy (Britt 2007; Dalli 2008). In the twelfth century, Sicily was the site of one of the very first experiments in state-building in the world (under the Normans, who introduced feudalism to the island), before becoming a sought-after colony of grand foreign powers like the rising French monarchy, the Habsburg Empire and then the Bourbons, who dominated in Spain and Italy from the sixteenth century well into the nineteenth. Sicily’s status changed many times; sometimes it was a totally dependent colony (not only under foreign powers in Paris or Madrid, but also under Italian continental cities like Naples), at other times it was a semi-autonomous regional state. When the mafia was first ‘discovered’ – something which occurred in the 1830s – Sicily was still a dominated country in the Mediterranean Sea, at the extreme southern periphery of Europe, very close to Africa, and longing for its independence, or at least some degree of political autonomy (Abulafia 1977, 1987; Bresc and Bresc-Bautier 1993; Takayama 2019).

While never formally a colony, for centuries Sicily had been under the dominion of some other, often foreign, political centre. The famous Sicilian Vespers (1282) epitomises the strong tensions this situation of subjection could generate. After Spanish domination, which lasted for more than two centuries (see Benigno 2007), a British protectorate was established in 1806 continuing until 1816 – a short period, but also a very productive one (Simon 2021). In those few years, in fact, a series of reforms changed the political and institutional structure of the island – including the definitive demise of feudalism and experimentation with a liberal constitution and parliamentary monarchy (Mack Smith 1968). The first half of the nineteenth century was a period of intense mobilization, and insurgences occurred in 1820, 1838, 1848 and 1866 (Nicotri 1934). Even after Italian unification (1861), Sicily was periodically the site and target of political projects of separation from the Italian national state, seen by many Sicilians as a colonial power. In 1943, the Sicilian separatist movement gained new force and, with the aid, it seems, of organized banditry (for the occasion promoted to the status of a newly formed Sicilian army) and the mafia, produced the most impressive moment of crisis in national identity since unification (Marino 1979). The granting of regional autonomy to Sicily after the Second World War was mainly an institutional response from the national centre to this deep and dangerous local quest for independence. In brief, we could say that the Sicilian mafia evolved in a context of semi-colonial dependence periodically marked by violent popular insurgencies against foreign dominators. The aforementioned alliance of mafia with political separatism was hardly occasional. We can say that no event of political mobilization in the modern history of Sicily, at least since the 1830s, has taken place without the active presence of the mafia and mafiosi. This presence is just the tip of the iceberg of the political role played by the mafia in Sicily, and, from this basis, in other parts of the globe.

The decades that predated the discovery of the (Sicilian) mafia were the same in which a relatively new institutional form, the sovereign territorial state, was expanding its hegemony from specific regions of central Europe, such as England and France (and to a lesser degree Prussia), where it was first elaborated, to the rest of Europe, including Sicily. Historically, both France and England had important vested interests in the Mediterranean island: France in the thirteenth century (the period of the Vespers), England (the other island where the Normans dominated and had started the institutional experiments which strongly contributed to the early emergence of the state: see Strayer 1970) until the early nineteenth century, during and after the Napoleonic wars, when Sicily was under the protection of the United Kingdom.

The multilayered political and social history of Sicily, from the Middle Ages to national unification under the Kingdom of Italy (1861) and beyond, accounts for the institutional synthesis that the name ‘mafia’ has the power to evoke. It is a claim of this book that understanding the Sicilian mafia means accounting for its social and institutional genesis in this complex and long-lasting web of influences and interests impinging upon Sicily since the Middle Ages (see Greif 2006 for a discussion about the lasting influence of medieval institutions). The rise of the mafia is just another aspect of the history of the conflict between the state and other political forms – such as city-states, empires, city-empires, as well as more primordial but effective organizations such as clans, families, warrior-leagues and so on – and it is within this history that it has to be embedded. Some elements suggest that the mafia’s institutional history may also be embedded in the history of political ideas, including utopian (e.g., socialist and, especially, anarchist) ones. In this respect, even though they are probably exceptional, the stories of Vito Cascio Ferro and Bernardino Verro – respectively, an influential godfather who was a leading local socialist and anarchist in his youth, and a renowned Sicilian trade unionist who was a mafioso in his youth – are enlightening. As a minor point of the book, I emphasize the anarchist moment as the plea for an understanding of the mafia’s structure and functions independently from any concession to the state as a political ideal and an institutional model; as I will never be tired of repeating, I want to analyse and assess ‘the mafia’ from a radically nonstate-centric and, possibly, non-Westernized point of view. This emphasis on anarchism is not only a theoretical move but a return to what I see as one major historical spur to the development of mafias all over the world, including Italy. Contrary to an entrenched belief – including Francis Marion Crawford’s claim, which I will cite in the next section – anarchism and the mafia, at least in Sicily and the US, ran parallel for a while. The book also capitalizes on this historical connection to derive a few theoretical implications.

However, the Mediterranean region is a cultural formation on its own (Cassano 2001; Piterberg et al. 2010), and in this historical and geographical juncture we have to locate the historical experience that gave ‘mafia’ its name, i.e. the Sicilian mafia. This was actually the great insight of Fernand Braudel’s 1949 study, The Mediterranean World: the idea that it was possible to have a society maintaining itself through the active exchange of goods, people and ideas without a unified ‘administrated territory’ as we know it in our statist times. This book further develops the idea that Sicily – i.e. the place where something like ‘a mafia’ was first identified in the 1860s and from which every analysis of the mafia as a social type should start – is located in this Mediterranean world between Europe (i.e. a dominant region of the global North) and Africa, or better, the African shores of the Mediterranean Sea (i.e. an important piece of the global South). It occupies an interstitial location between Europe/civilization and Africa/barbarism (see, e.g., Niceforo 1899). It is worth recalling that, just after political unification, many functionaries and soldiers coming from the northern Italian regions labelled Sicily as ‘Africa’ (see Schneider 1998; Moe 2002). Indeed, there are also documented connections between mafiosi and Africa at least since the end of the nineteenth century – and in some periods, there was a mafia family based in Tunis. But the relation between the mafia and Muslim Africa goes deeper than this, and has to do with the common roots in the medieval Arab and Muslim domination that produced the word ‘mafia’ itself – a local popular derivation from Arab terms meaning, not by chance, ‘protection, shelter’ (see Patella 2002; see also pp. 5–7).

This ‘zone of contact’ has a culture of its own. Honour is a well-known element of this Mediterranean cultural world (Peristiany 1965; Herzfeld 1987; Peristiany and Pitt-Rivers 1992; Blok 2001; Giordano 2012), on which even Pierre Bourdieu (1977) focused attention in his early experiences as an ethnologist working in Algeria among the Berbers (it must be recalled that the Berbers were among Sicily’s rulers in the Middle Ages). Other common features can be listed as well – for instance, a certain conception of justice and of personal loyalties (e.g., Rosen 2002; Cornell 2005). Indeed, we should remember that Sicily was also heavily influenced by Greek culture, as its eastern shores were colonized by the Greeks in the eighth century bc. As shown by van Wees (2001), archaic ancient Greek society and politics had many similarities with the contemporary mafia’s culture of violent competition. However, it is a matter of fact that although the Greek influence was strong in the eastern provinces of Sicily, that was not the case in the western provinces, where the mafia developed. In the western provinces of the island, it is the Arabs who left a legacy. Rather than conceiving them just as mere evidence of deeply rooted traditions, I suggest that the similarities between the Sicilian mafia and ancient Greek politics have to do with what, in the last chapter of the book, will be called the ‘elementary forms of political life’ (see also Posner 1979).

What the Arab, Greek and African elements remind us is that Sicily, and the Sicilian mafia as well, developed in an area where the globalizing world about which we so intensively talk today was already somehow in place (Abu-Lughod 1989). Sicily existed midway between North and South, influenced by European history but geographically, and even ethnologically, closer to the Mediterranean world, to that southern part of Europe which borders on the northern part of Africa. Using concepts elaborated in northern Europe, at the historical core of the global North, or in the US to understand other parts of the world is an example of what a few years ago Susanne Rudolph (2005) termed ‘the imperialism of categories’ (see also Rudolph and Rudolph 2010). This is also what sociological research on the mafia has typically done, exporting concepts and methods typically rooted in Anglo-American Lockean universal liberalism (sometimes in German neo-Kantian ethical universalism) and applying them to make sense of the mafia’s patterns of social life, that is, a totally different historical, geographical and cultural experience. This alternative, southern location and identification is what this book wants to privilege, grounding our understanding of the Sicilian mafia in situated, local knowledge, and connecting the sociological understanding of the mafia to alternative conceptual repertoires, on the one hand, and to contemporary pleas for the rethinking of the social sciences as a world scale affair, on the other (e.g., Chakrabarty 2000; Alatas 2006a; Connell 2007; Patel 2010; Comaroff and Comaroff 2012, 2016). This is the object of the Chapters 4–6 of this book, which offers what I would label a political anatomy of the (Sicilian) mafia.

To limit the history of mafia – even of the Sicilian mafia – to the adventures of a single country would in any case mean to surreptitiously accept what has been called methodological nationalism – the methodological assumption that ‘a particular nation would provide the constant unit of observation through all historical transformations, the “thing” whose change history was supposed to describe’ (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002, 305). Problematic in all cases, this assumption is especially troubling in the study of mafias. Wherever and whenever they developed – in the first half of the nineteenth century in southern Italy, at the beginning of the twentieth century in the eastern US, in the eighteenth century in Japan and China, after the collapse of communism in Russia – mafias are indeed part and parcel of a series of overlapping transnational, sociospatial networks of power which embrace large and largely unpredictable areas of the world (Mann 1986a, 1986b; Castells 2000; Collins 2011).

The scope of mafia groups has always been larger than the individual regions from which they take their various names and to which they extend their jurisdiction. In these overlapping networks comprising entire national societies and their borders, imperialistic projects of political control launched from some centre have had to come to terms with locally grounded instances of mobilization and resistance. In many senses, especially when seen from the southern regions of Italy, the same political mobilization that produced Italy as a national state was one of those imperialistic projects launched by a northern centre. The history of the Sicilian mafia runs parallel to that of the national state at least since 1865 – when the term was used for the first time in an official document to identify the troubling local social conditions of resistance to the new government met by functionaries coming from the north of the peninsula. Emerging mafiosi specialized in mediation between local communities and the representatives of the central state. In Sicily, as in other cases, the mafia emerged as a structure of intermediation and communication between variously identifiable centres and their peripheries (Blok 1974; Schneider and Schneider 1976). But mafias interacted and communicated also among themselves. While there is good evidence that mafias developed autonomously in more than one centre of diffusion (Sicily, Calabria, Naples, New York, Hong Kong, etc.), there are also clues that imitation and exchanges of items and practices have been common among the various instances. This is particularly clear in the case of the Russian mafia, whose adepts have often imitated Sicilian mafiosi to legitimize their identities and acquire an effective technology of the self (see Varese 2001; Volkov 2002; Gambetta 2009).

At the same time, we should notice that even though mafias have developed in many different parts of the globe, they do not exist everywhere, and even in the same country (e.g., the US) not every ethnic group has produced its own mafia. Why mafia develops in some places or among some people and not in others – under the same structural conditions, of course – is something only a culturally sensitive analysis could hope to explain. Using a well-known metaphor (Swidler 1986; see also Tilly 1978, 1995), we could say that the cultural repertoire used by would-be mafiosi has to show some consistency to be recognized as such, and the ingredients for the formation of a mafia-like repertoire of collective and individual practice may not be available everywhere.

This original and constitutive transnational, global scope of mafias explains the subtitle originally imagined for this book: ‘a southern view’. It claims that we gain in both sociological understanding and political effectiveness (that is, in our fight against organized crime) if we recognize the mafia as a culturally based expression/form of political organization, variously developed in its plural instances far from the established centres but always in some relationship with them. This form may have run parallel to the development of the state (and the diffusion of capitalism as well), but it is fundamentally different from the modern state (and capitalism) as institutional mode(s) of organizing political (and, respectively, economic) life.

To describe the mafia as ‘a state inside the state’, a ‘shadow state’, a ‘counterstate’, or as ‘the dark side of capitalism’, a ‘deviant form of capitalist entrepreneurship’ and, last but not least, as an ‘industry’ (if this concept is used in its now common economic sense), misses the point, and loses the possibility of capturing the intimate constitution of a phenomenon that normally overcomes the established boundaries of the individual state and does not necessarily follow those of the (transnational) capitalist system. The mafia has an institutional autonomy which is irreducible to both the state and capitalism, two originally European institutions that have largely monopolized the minds of social scientists – including scholars of mafia – since the nineteenth century, and only in the last two decades have they been subjected to detailed criticism with respect to their usefulness and soundness as universal categories of social analysis. From this angle, the book tries to go beyond the ‘imperialism of categories’ – the academic practice of imposing concepts on the others, in other words, ‘the export of concepts as part of a hegemonic relationship’ (Rudolph 2005, 6) – situating knowledge of and on the mafia in a globalizing world and, above all, in a globalizing social theory (Burawoy 2005; Connell 2007; Patel 2010; Comaroff and Comaroff 2012). In this move, the established intellectual centres are resisted and other centres are reclaimed. It is a southern theory of the mafia that this book aims to develop. Figure 1.1 represents the subversive intellectual move the book attempts in a map-like form (from early modern times).

Figure 1.1: The ‘modern description of Europe’, by Sebastian Münster (‘Europa das ein Drittheil der Erden nach Gelegenheit unsern Zeiten’, 1578).